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At a time when recruitment has evolved from business process to art form, it’s important to consider how do you go about influencing candidate experience. Great talent is hard to find, harder to please and comes with a high degree of self-awareness and self-assurance.

Recruiters want bespoke candidates. Candidates want bespoke jobs. When the workplace culture bar is set this high, especially in tech and sales, hiring the right people depends largely on the quality of the hiring experience.

As you kick off your hiring strategy in 2019, you’ll need to make sure that you deliver a candidate experience on par with the best in order to turn your hiring process into success stories. Here are a few things to remember about the impact of candidate experience on hiring and team success.

1. Great talent is hard to find, but harder to keep.

When it comes to top talent, it’s no longer a case of “just another candidate”. Yes, candidates are obviously there to be hired, but the best candidates will choose to be hired… or not. They know what they bring to the table and are likely to keep their options open for The Job™: the one that values their desire to engage with the organization and make a difference. To design the best candidate experience, you must delve deeper than the metrics behind skill sets and resumes.

Candidate experience can be measured through surveys at strategic points during the hiring process. These questionnaires offer you real-time feedback on how your process works for candidates and what needs changing. Asking your candidate for their two cents also helps them feel valued and heard. And the more you develop that sense of value and purpose, the higher your chances of beating rival companies to their signature.

2. Being open and honest is simple but effective.

As a recruiter, you represent your organization to candidates; you’re the window through which they catch their first glimpses of what it’ll be like to work there. Needless to say, the quality of communication between you and your candidates determines their perception of the organization and its culture.

Candidates often complain about the lack of transparency. Being open about all things policy lets them make a well-informed decision, whereas doing the opposite makes you comes across as evasive. Candidates won’t just pick up on this instantly; they’ll hold on to it, create a bad impression of your company, and share that terrible news with their networks and the world at large via Glassdoor and other job portals.

3. Ghosting can be countered.

These days, ghosting is no longer simply the recruiter’s prerogative. It is increasingly candidates who lead the process. Changing times call for changing equations! Chasing candidates and getting them to respond is not your idea of fun, so be forthright instead..

One of the most common candidate complaints is not hearing back after an interview. Whether a candidate is going to be hired or not, it’s important to keep them informed of your decision. Waiting endlessly to learn if you got the job can be stressful, but it can also deprive them of other opportunities if the eventual answer is a ‘no’.

4. Decisiveness pays off.

To cut down on ghosting and candidate pipeline time, be sure to roll out an offer to your first-choice candidate as soon as you’ve zeroed in on just who that person is. A high degree of decisiveness speaks to candidates about the value your organization places on their experience.

On the other hand, procrastinating in the hopes of finding someone even better might cost you dearly. Not only might you come up empty in your search for elusive perfection, but you might not even be able to fall back on your first (or second) choice, leaving you to either hire a potentially poor fit or start all over again.

5. AI really does help.

Personalizing your recruitment strategy, reducing candidate pipeline time and keeping communication channels open cannot be achieved solely by one person or team. It’s impossible to realistically devote that much attention to these tasks while still scaling your hiring volume to match internal demand.

Enter the power of My Ally, powered by artificial Intelligence. Our solution takes the robot out of the recruiter by automating tasks like setting up interviews and following up with candidates, giving you more time to build talent relationships and deliver a top-quality experience.

The Way Forward

Speed, communication and transparency are the cornerstones of any good candidate experience. With efficient processes and the power of AI, you’ll quickly strengthen your candidate experience and improve hiring success, while saving yourself plenty of time and energy.